If you’ve spent time in any public school across Fairfax County, or any public school across the country for that matter, chances are you’ve heard people mention the single-player number puzzle game, 2048. The simplicity and ease of the game, as well as the satisfaction that reaching 2048 gives the player, makes the game enthralling and addictive to play to any bored teenager looking to kill time. How this simple game has spread and become such a universal phenomenon in schools over time remains somewhat of a mystery, but it’s safe to say the game has succeeded in adding the slightest bit more fun to the average student’s monotonous school life.  

2048 was created in 2014 by 19-year-old Gabrielle Cirulli and has been very successful. The objective of the game is to combine similarly numbered tiles by sliding them back and forth on a 4 x 4 grid, and the game ends when the grid fills up and no more tiles can be combined. Since the release of the original game, several spin-offs such as 2048 Cupcakes, Flappy 2048, and Doge 2048, have emerged. More recently, The California Institute of Technology, Caltech, released a version of the game in which the player combines colleges to reach Caltech. This inspired The Massachusetts Institute of Technology to release their own version of the game, making the first and weakest tile Caltech, the school’s rival. 

GetOakton is an Oakton High School spin-off of 2048 created by student Neil Suri(11) and was inspired by GetCaltech. The tiles for this version are other Northern Virginia schools including Westfield, Woodson, Chantilly, McLean, and Robinson. GetOakton, getoakton.xyz, has taken the school by storm. In a survey of 51 students, 14 responded as to winning the game and reaching Oakton. A second level of the game has been added allowing players, after reaching Oakton, to play GetUVA. 

Edit: Unfortunately, recently the GetOakton site has been taken down.